Counterintelligence investigations are by their very nature complex, nuanced and methodically slow, all facts that today’s news media outlets seem to ignore as they chronicle the Russia collusion probe.

The past week provided fresh examples of how journalists endlessly seeking to portray the Russia probe in black-and-white terms can misinform the public through omission, cherry-picking or lack of context.

The inference was drawn because Alston & Bird was believed to one of the law firms involved in the closed-door litigation. To bolster their case, the media outlets noted the firm had represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (back in 2003) and some conservative clients since.

If a reporter is going to cherry-pick old clients in a story about Mueller, Steele is just as big a name as any Russian. Yet, zero mention.

Here’s another one. The New York Times — which considers itself a bastion of journalism but whose work of late was questioned by its former editor — wrote a story this week on the federal obstruction-of-justice indictment of Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

If Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin were important to mention for her Trump meeting, then why wouldn’t they be just as important to the guys who helped create the dossier that spurred the Russia probe?

Seems to me that selective editing and cherry-picking did not serve the reader well.

And there’s more paradigm-changing facts excluded from the Times story. Veselnitskaya managed to get into the U.S. because the Obama administration originally gave her a special parole visa.

Hmmm. The lawyer who sets up the Trump Tower meeting gets her original entry to the United States based on a special act by the Obama Justice Department. Seems relevant but, once again, absent from the story.

My third favorite omission of the week comes from the media’s coverage of the secret court filing made by Manafort’s lawyers. It turned out not to be so secret because its redactions were made public by a technical glitch.

Countless news organizations concentrated on the fact that Mueller believes Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with a man in his firm named Konstantin Kilimnik, whom prosecutors claim is tied to Russian intelligence.

Unfortunately, readers didn’t get to ask that question because they were kept in the dark.

Now, my critique of these stories should not be construed as criticism about their newsworthiness. All three developments were important news that should have been covered.

But in all three examples the media’s execution involved serious omissions that left important truths on the cutting-room floor.

And while we are on the subject of that cutting-room floor, we’ve had endless coverage of Trump and his connections to Russia.

Here are some facts that often get omitted in that coverage. There was a presidential candidate in 2016:

Whose husband traveled to Moscow and collected a $500,000 speaking fee from Vladimir Putin cronies while she was serving as secretary of State, negotiating with the Russians;

Who ran a Cabinet agency that authorized the sale of a large swath of strategic American uranium assets to Putin’s nuclear company at the very moment the FBI had proven the company was engaged in extortion, bribery, kickbacks and racketeering;

Whose family’s charitable empire accepted support from a lobbying and public relations firm working for a Russian nuclear giant needing State Department approval for a U.S. transaction.

Her name was Hillary Clinton.

That is relevant because Russia’s influence machine is far more sophisticated, bipartisan and far-reaching than the American media has portrayed it to be.

And those omissions provide a distorted portrait of the truth.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.